Untitled Document
The State of Search Engine Marketing In India
This report is a first of its kind. Never before in India or indeed in any other geography in the world that we know of has anybody used technology to this extent to discern knowledge about the search engine marketing business.
The first thing to say is that this report is an estimate. We did not get any data from the search engines( who are famously quiet about disclosing their numbers anyways) or the advertisers (who like to be just as quiet). What we did was analyze all data that was in the public domain by running searches, noting the presence of ads by advertisers, assigning a value to those ads from experience, and making some rather involved calculations. In effect we did the online equivalent of what a TV Ad Index or media auditor does.
We checked the results against some real-life data, and we're comfortable with the findings.
There is more than one reason why these are just estimates. Apart from the reluctance of the engines and the advertisers to talk numbers, there is the issue of mathematical approximation. We are aware of the extent of assumptions here, and have tried to restrict their effect to a minimum.
Third, most search practitioners will know that if you.ve been advertising for a while, you have the benefit of "history" where you get a higher rank for the price you pay compared to what a new entrant would pay today. Our prices reflect what today's costs are as opposed to what you paid when you got in. If you feel your spend here is overstated, that's probably the reason.
The best way to use this report is to not be fixed on absolute numbers, but on relative comparisons. That's where there are lessons to be learned.
But first look at the industry! It's grown from nowhere to have over 40,000 advertisers targeting Indian web users. That's probably more there are on all TV channels. Consider these numbers 'over 1 billion searches a month, over 300 million searches with ads on them, almost 5 million clicks on ads every month. Search marketing has come of age in India.
Some highlights: Rs.230 crores of ad spend on this media is aimed at Indians alone. Of this, about a third, over Rs.70 crores is spent by Indian companies. For an industry that barely got off the ground a couple of years ago, it's a huge leap.
There are three types of spending on search :
- Indian companies spending in India
- Overseas companies spending in India and
- Indian companies spending overseas.
We've restricted ourselves to the first two categories and this report is about Indian companies aiming at Indians. We also defined "Indian company spending in India" not as a company of Indian origin, but as one with operations here. Our assumption is that there is local involvement in all spend aimed here. Hence, eBay.in counts as a local company while eBay.au, also advertising to Indian surfers, does not.
A note of thanks to all the Pinstromers. An enterprise of this scale wouldn't have been possible without the help of some very smart people. And to the redoubtable, Dr.Subho Ray of the IAMAI.